Four years ago, Ely High School Class of 1994 alumni Jeffrey “Raven” Kromer was staring into an uncertain future after the last of his seven children left the house. Today, he works as an intern at NASA.
“I had basically been house-husbanding,” said Kromer, “There were seven kids, so it was a full-time job.”
He hoped to re-enter the workforce after his youngest left home, but his wife, Deb, suggested a different path.
“She goes, why don’t you go back to school? You’ve been talking about it for 20 years and the kids aren’t at home anymore,” said Kromer.
In the nearly three decades after high school, Kromer had published books, illustrated magazines, worked as a freelance IT professional, raised a family, and served as a live radio broadcaster in Virginia, Minnesota — but he never completed a bachelor’s degree. The time was right.
“There’s basically two (interests) in my life that have lasted since I was a little kid,” said Kromer, “Stars and planets, and dinosaurs.”
He gained acceptance to the University of Hawaii at Hilo, on the island chain that provides the best place on the planet to study the stars, said Kromer. Since then, he has quickly begun to make up for lost time with his research career, saying “yes” to many opportunities.
“Being on one research project as an undergraduate is unusual,” Kromer said, “I’m on four.”
At the university, his research projects range from dwarf galaxies to Newtonian energy conservation and a study which compares the sand of the Hawaiian islands to the minerals on Mars.
The last project launched his journey to NASA after he won a grant through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to present his work at a conference in Italy. That was only the beginning, however. Kromer also filled out an application for a summer internship at the organization.
“I was in the middle of preparing my research for Italy and figuring out what my summer was going to look like, and I got this notice that I’d been selected for the internship,” said Kromer.
“Less than one in 100 of their applicants get chosen. I’m kind of like, Oh my God, what did I put on my resume? So yeah, I did not expect it,” said Kromer. After reading the acceptance letter, he said, “I jumped up and started yelling and jumping around. It was great.”
This summer, Kromer has been studying one of Jupiter’s moons with the NASA Europa Clipper Mission team at Johns Hopkins’ Advanced Physics Laboratory. He said this moon, Europa, could be one of the only other places in the solar system capable of hosting life, thanks to its subsurface ocean.
“I’ve been following the Europa Clipper Mission since I first heard about it, and now I get to work on it,” Kromer said, “I’m so thrilled to be able to do this, to be part of something that we’re still going to be studying the data we collect 20, 30 years from now.”
He says it’s been a great place to work, with an amazing campus and community. The long road and its challenges have been worth it.
“Math has always been a struggle,” Kromer said, “Of course, I haven’t used any of this stuff for 20 years.”
“Any of my math teachers there in Ely will tell you that I was terrible at math,” he joked, “They will be thrilled to know that I’m still terrible at math.”
Kromer says he’s gotten better, however, and he’s now in the STEM Honors program. He plans to pursue a PhD in the future, pending his ability to find loans and federal student aid to cover the costs of a graduate education, which can be “ridiculously expensive,” he said.
He’ll be finishing this summer with a short stint at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. After finishing his undergraduate studies, the future is up in the air.
“Of course, the big goal with the PhD was I wanted to work at NASA,” said Kromer, “So this checks a lot of boxes for me, being able to do this (internship) this summer.”
